In releasing Preventing Electoral Fraud in Zimbabwe [PDF] the Institute comments that -
Though life expectancy in Zimbabwe has dropped to 45 years, the voters’ roll, as it stood in October 2010, contains the names of:Johnson comments that -
• roughly 1 490 ‘new’ voters (never previously registered) aged over 100;The roll also has roughly 16 800 voters who not only share the same date of birth — recorded as 1st January 1901 — but were also toddlers at the time that Cecil Rhodes died in March 1902. All of them are now more than 110 years old.
• some 41 100 voters (some new and some earlier listed) aged 100 or more, which is four times the number of centenarians in Britain;
• about 4 370 new voters over 90 years old; and
• a total of some 132 500 such nonagenarians.
The roll also lists about 230 new voters under the voting age of 18. In October 2010, many of them were under ten years old while one was a baby and quite a number were aged two.
To make matters far worse, the current roll is also based on the 2008 voters' roll, which contains about 2.5m names too many, given Zimbabwe’s probable population size. This phantom vote is more than enough to settle the outcome of any election. ...
Instead of removing these 2.5m fictitious entries, the Registrar-General, Mr Tobaiwa Mudede, an outspoken Zanu-PF supporter, has added more than 360 500 new voters to the current roll. Yet many are far too old or too young to merit inclusion. "If experience is any guide, phantom 'voters' are likely to vote early and often in the next Zimbabwean poll,” Johnson cautions.
Comparing the voters’ roll as of October 2010 with the roll used in the 2008 harmonised elections, we find that in 2010 there are 366,550 new voters who have not appeared on any previous roll. This is extremely surprising considering that the overall population of Zimbabwe has been falling due both to a very high mortality rate and large-scale emigration. It might have been expected, nonetheless, that there would be some new voters in the youngest age group of roughly 18 to 25.In Australia meanwhile the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has released a 122 page report on Management of the Aviation and Maritime Security Identification Card Schemes.
There is also a very unlikely total of 49,239 new voters over the age of 50 – and this when average life expectancy in Zimbabwe has fallen to 44.8 years. Even more surprising is the fact that 16,033 of these new voters are over the age of 70 years, while 1,488 of them are over the age of 100. ...
Then again, a number of these new voters have no valid address, despite the stipulation requiring this. ...
Further, it is important to point out that the 366,550 new voters who have been added to the roll as of October 2010 are by no means equally distributed around the country, as one might expect. In the extreme cases, one finds that the constituency of Cheredzi South has only 33 new voters added to its roll while the constituency of Gokwe Nembudziya has no less than 13,896 new voters added to its roll. There can be no satisfactory reason for such extraordinary variations.
One of the most striking anomalies is the number of exceptionally old people among the new voters. There are, indeed, no less than 4,368 new voters over the age of 90 years on the voters’ roll as at 1st October 2010. If one amalgamates the list of new voters with the old list, one finds an extraordinary total of 132,540 persons over the age of 90 on the roll. Given the average life expectancy of less than half that figure, this is completely incredible. In addition, we find that once again these nonagenarians are not evenly distributed among constituencies. Instead, they are again bunched into the same minority of constituencies which have had exceptionally high numbers of new voters added to them. ...
Finally, there are no less than 16,828 registered voters with the same date of birth, given as 1st January 1901. It might be argued that the enumerator simply gave this birth date to all very senior citizens who were in doubt as to their true age – though that already suggests an impermissible degree of official intervention in the registration process. However, if one's credulity is stretched by this extraordinary number of 110-year-olds, it is stretched way beyond breaking point when one learns that no less than 1,101 of these 110-year-olds are registered in Mr Mugabe's birthplace, Zvimba, presumably to act as a reserve category capable of producing particularly pleasing results for Zanu-PF there. ...
To conclude, then, the Zimbabwe voters’ roll, as at October 2010, is not only a wholly incredible document but an extremely dangerous one, which lends itself to all manner of electoral manipulation or ballot-stuffing. It is more or less guaranteed to produce disputed results. It is beyond redemption and cannot even be used as one of the building blocks in the construction of a new and authoritative voters' roll. It simply has to be scrapped completely, while work on a proper roll must begin again from scratch.
The report comments that -
Consistent with their legislative frameworks, the ASIC and MSIC schemes provide for the involvement of a range of entities, including both industry organisations and Australian Government agencies. OTS, a division within DIT, administers the regulatory framework for the schemes on behalf of the Australian Government, and AusCheck, a branch within AGD, coordinates the background checks of ASIC and MSIC applicants. There are also over 1200 industry participants that regulate access to secure areas where the display of ASICs and MSICs is required, in excess of 200 bodies that are authorised to issue the cards, and some 250,000 cardholders, who are required to meet their obligations to properly display a valid security card while in a secure area. ...The release coincides with claims that security at Australian defence facilities and embassies has compromised through deliberate fabrication by government vetting personnel of security clearances.
[S]some of the risks associated with the current delivery model could be better managed by OTS. These risks primarily relate to issuing bodies and visitor management and are inherent in the devolved nature of the schemes.
As previously noted, the regulatory framework of the ASIC and MSIC schemes includes over 200 authorised issuing bodies that process applications, produce and issue the identification cards. The majority of cards (80 per cent), however, are issued by a small number (20 per cent) of issuing bodies. Further, 35 per cent of all cards are issued by commercially based ‘third party’ issuing bodies, that have a limited ongoing relationship to the applicant. While the schemes prescribe mandatory standards for issuing bodies, these standards are not being consistently met by some issuing bodies. This includes how an applicant’s operational need for the card is established and maintaining adequate records to demonstrate that an applicant’s identity has been confirmed. ...
OTS has developed a compliance framework that aims to cooperatively encourage compliance through education and audit activities, with the focus being on high-risk participants. While the framework is appropriately targeted at high-risk participants, it could be strengthened if information obtained through OTS’s audit, inspection and stakeholder programs was used to better inform and focus the schemes’ compliance activities.
A further area of concern is visitors entering secure areas at airports. Visitors can obtain a visitor identification card (VIC) and, although a VIC holder must be supervised, they do not need to undergo the background check required for an ASIC. Concerns about the VIC regime have been raised by the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit over a number of years. Revised regulations to tighten the VIC scheme are being developed, although these changes have been slow to eventuate. The total number of VICs being issued is not known, but around 40 000 were issued at one delivery gate alone at a major airport in 2009–10. Moreover, many VICs are issued repeatedly to the same individuals, effectively bypassing the ASIC background checking process. ...
It is difficult to obtain a reliable count of the total number of current ASIC and MSIC cards, or the currency of all cards on the AusCheck database. This is despite the database being established to provide a comprehensive record of all ASIC and MSIC applicants and cardholders. Each issuing body also maintains a database of its cardholders. Although AusCheck has developed a range of controls over the integrity of the information entered into its database, changes in one database do not always flow through to the other. As a consequence the two data sets differ markedly
The ABC reports that whistleblowers who were formerly subcontracted to the Defence Security Authority (DSA) claim that they were given direct instructions from senior Defence staff to use false data in order to speed up security vetting of civilian and military personnel.
The three people were involved in checking documents supplied by applicants for a security clearance. Once the checks were complete a report was sent to ASIO to see whether the applicant was a person of interest on the ASIO data base. Pressure to reduce a backlog in processing (the DSA was handling about 23,000 security checks per year as of 2009) is claimed to have resulted in staff using bogus details to fill in gaps in thousands of applications, "including top secret level clearances sent to ASIO" -
Information like where you live, or previous employment, they didn't really care about that stuff, just make it up, put in some dates, put unemployed for periods that were missing, addresses just put the area address, or find a street or make some information up to fill in those gaps ...
There was a large percentage of the applications that came my way that did have gaps, that did have problems that needed to be phoned up about - I would think about 25 per cent.
The analyst started to get impatient with me because she said,'this is what you do, we do this all the time', manufacturing certain birth dates, filling in gaps of addresses. ...
I took a couple of applications aside from my day's work and I said this has this problem, and this has that problem, one of them didn't have a birth certificate, there is not an address here, no employment, questions like that," she said.
"[I] asked what do you want me to do about it? And I was told these words: 'Be creative'."
